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Is not this neglect of the roof the chief reason why we Northerners fear the night? When darkness is concerned, the cowardice of our poetry is notorious. It skulks, so to speak, when beyond the glare of the street lights. I propound it as a question for scholars.

‘Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.

Why is the night conceived as the time for the bogey to be abroad?–an

… evil thing that walks by night,
In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen,
Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost
That breaks his magic chains at curfew time.

Why does not this slender, cerulean dame keep normal hours and get sleepy after dinner with the rest of us–and so to bed? Such a baneful thing is night, “hideous,” reeking with cold shivers and gloom, from which morning alone gives relief.

Pack, clouds, away! and welcome, day!
With night we banish sorrow.

Day is jocund that stands on the misty mountain tops.

But we cannot expect the night to be friendly and wag its tail when we slam against it our doors and, until lately, our windows. Naturally it takes to ghoulishness. It was in the South where the roofs are flat and men sleep as friends with the night that it was written, “The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament showeth his handiwork.”

I get full of my subject as I write and a kind of rage comes over me as I think of the wrongs the roof has suffered. It is the only part of the house that has not kept pace with the times. To say that you have a good roof is taken as meaning that your roof is tight, that it keeps out the water, that it excels in those qualities in which it excelled equally three thousand years ago. What you ought to mean is that you have a roof that is flat and has things on it that make it livable, where you can walk, disport yourself, or sleep; a house-top view of your neighbors’ affairs; an airy pleasance with a full sweep of stars; a place to listen of nights to the drone of the city; a place of observation, and if you are so inclined, of meditation.

Everything but the roof has been improved. The basement has been coddled with electric lights until a coal hole is no longer an abode of mystery. Even the garret, that used to be but a dusty suburb of the house and lumber room for early Victorian furniture, has been plastered and strewn with servants’ bedrooms.

There was a garret once: somewhat misty now after these twenty years. It was not daubed to respectability with paint, nor was it furnished forth as bedrooms; but it was rough-timbered, and resounded with drops when the dark clouds passed above. On bright days a cheerful light lay along the floor and dust motes danced in its luminous shaft. And always there was cobwebbed stillness. But on dark days, when the roof pattered and the branches of trees scratched the shingles and when windows rattled, a deeper obscurity crept out of the corners. Yet was there little fear in the place. This was the front garret where the theatre was, with the practicable curtain. But when the darker mood was on us, there was the back garret. It was six steps lower and over it the roof crouched as if to hide its secrets. The very men that built it must have been lowering, bearded fellows; for they put into it many corners and niches and black holes. The wood, too, from which it was fashioned must have been gnarled and knotted and the nails rusty and crooked. One window cast a narrow light down the middle of this room, but at both sides was immeasurable night. When you had stooped in from the sunlight and had accustomed your eyes to the dimness, you found yourself in an uncertain anchorage of old furniture, abandoned but offering dusty covert for boys with the light of brigands in their eyes. A pirates’ den lay safe behind the chimney, protected by a bristling thicket of chairs and table legs, to be approached only on hands and knees after divers rappings. And back there in the dark were strange boxes–strange boxes, stout and securely nailed. But the garret has gone.